In the United States and other developed countries, total network traffic by cellular users, though already significant, continues to increase substantially each year. This continued increase is driven by many factors including improved cellular devices, continuing deployment of advanced 3G technologies, increasingly affordable pricing and increased indoor use of cellular devices, e.g., to replace or supplement land lines. Moreover, with respect to data traffic, the size of data objects is continually increasing, keeping pace with the expanded capabilities of the networks.
With the great pace of cellular adoption, the subscriber base continues to expand and shift. There are many cellular carriers that supply service to subscribers, and with the varied pricing and service provided by carriers, it is not uncommon for a subscriber to shift their business from one carrier to another. There can also be a shift of subscribers from one carrier to another due to a divestiture/acquisition of properties involving a large wireless carrier.
In the past, such migrations were labor-intensive and error-prone. In particular, a large porting of several thousand vehicles at once required that a list of affected vehicles be sent to the telematic operator. After the list was received, a manual process was used to convert the vehicles, one vehicle at a time. The process was manually performed by both the telematic operator and the wireless carrier with little coordination and a higher-than-normal potential for subscriber impact during the process. For example, a telematics operator executing a porting operation may simply attempt to connect to devices in random order, numerical order, or alphabetical order. However, the inventors have discovered that this can incur significant delays, even for properly functioning devices, if there are one or more affected devices for which connectivity is problematic.
A system and method are needed for enabling large scale reassignment of subscribers from one carrier to another without requiring the painstaking and error prone reassignment process currently in use.